I won't spend a lot of time talking about it, other than to say that Notes 8.5.1 is the bestNotesclientever. If you've been hanging on the fence waiting for the 8.x code stream to (finally) mature to useable, this is it.

Why would I say this is good news for Exchange users? Principally because of the Dark Years (circa 2002-2007 when IBM let Notes & Domino slide while it focused on...otherinitiatives.), I now do a lot of Exchange/Sharepoint work along with my Lotus Domino/Quickr/Sametime work. The Dark Years allowed competing platforms like Exchange to almost catch up to where N/D was (9 years ago!). Now, we're seeing what looks like a sustained effort to both dramatically update the N/D platform and market it. This is obvious good for N/D users, but it's also good for Outlook/Exchange users as well.

Microsoft has always produced it's best software when responding to (what it perceives) as direct threats. If you've worked with Exchange 2003/2007/2010, I'm sure you'll agree that they are pretty much incremental improvements. Yeah, there's nice stuff there, but the principle reason people migrate to new versions of Exchange is because support ends for the version of Exchange they're on - not to get spiffy new features. If IBMotus is really committed here to pushing Notes/Domino/Quickr/Sametime (only time will tell), then this should wake Microsoft up and make it improve it's software as well.